Following the Light, and Making Faces

By HELEN A. HARRISON

Published: February 22, 2004

THE painter and printmaker Chuck Close and his wife, Leslie, started coming to the Hamptons in 1974, renting a beach cabin that summer. For the next 10 years, they spent their summers in East Hampton. In 1985, they bought the Bridgehampton property where they live, and where Mr. Close works, for half the year.

Mr. Close was originally drawn to the area because of its reputation as an art colony and as the home of the first abstract expressionists, who began to cluster around East Hampton in the 1940's.

''I went out to see where de Kooning and Pollock lived,'' Mr. Close said in a recent conversation in his Manhattan studio, ''and to go to the cemetery where they're all planted,'' a reference to Green River, the Springs graveyard where more than 30 artists rest side by side with the ancestors of local families.

But the appeal of his Bridgehampton home is the ocean. ''It's where I'm the most happy and the most relaxed,'' said Mr. Close, 63, who spends the rest of the year in Manhattan. ''I need the rhythmic pounding of the surf. Maybe it's like the fetal heartbeat.''

Mr. Close, whose graphic work is the subject of a survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan through April 18, is one of many artists who have been drawn to the East End, and who continue to give it its vitality as a center of artistic creation. Like many other painters working there, he is captivated by the special quality of the light. As he pointed out, ''Everybody talks about the light, but it is phenomenal.''

''When I start a painting in the country and then bring it in to the city, I'm so shocked at how it looks,'' he explained. ''I'm constantly telling people, you should have seen it in the country, where you can really see the color.

''I have daylight in my studio here as well,'' he continued, gesturing toward a large painting in progress on his motorized easel, ''but it's just not the same.''

Looking at Mr. Close's work, however, one would be hard pressed to connect it with the light in the Hamptons. His imagery has nothing to do with his immediate surroundings, nor is there any indication of an environmental context. His primary subject since the late 1960's has been the isolated human face, which he first photographs and then translates into paintings, drawings, prints or other media, often enlarging it to monumental proportions.

Yet even his earliest monochrome works, which were often dismissed as slick photorealism, are really not about depicting an accurate likeness. ''Likeness is an important byproduct of what I do,'' he told the critic Gerrit Henry, as quoted in an article in Art in America in 1975, ''but only to the extent that if the photograph I paint from looks like the person, the painting will look like the photograph.''

Mr. Close's paintings of photographed faces are not the same as portraits painted from life, nor are they ''realistic'' when they are purged of color, as many are, and shown in a shallow depth of field, where foreground and background details are lost. Instead, they address the question of how visual information is communicated by confronting the viewer with a wealth of detail that must be perceived, recognized and processed. At this point in his career, it is as if he wants to make the image as abstract as possible but still recognizable.

A native of Washington State, Mr. Close graduated from the University of Washington in 1962, and then studied at Yale University's School of Art and Architecture. There, he emulated Willem de Kooning and seemed destined to become a third-generation abstract expressionist, although with a dash of Pop iconoclasm.

But soon after his graduation in 1964 with an M.F.A., he adopted the style that has become his signature. Still, he never lost his admiration for his New York School forebears. He just did not want to imitate them.

Mr. Close came to New York City in 1967 and established himself in SoHo, when young artists were illegally converting raw loft spaces into live-in studios, and avant-garde galleries were opening in shabby storefronts. He appreciated the camaraderie and mutual support such a community can generate. ''It's important for me to have kindred spirits,'' he said.

Among Mr. Close's classmates at Yale were Brice Marden, Janet Fish, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Jennifer Bartlett and others who would make names for themselves in contemporary art. Several of these friends, as well as relatives and other artists, would become Mr. Close's subjects.

''I try to work with people I have a significant relationship with, either personally or through their work,'' he said. He also requires them to pose with no restrictions on how he might use their image.

One of his earliest subjects was Philip Glass, whose full frontal face first appeared in Mr. Close's repertory of subjects in 1969, when he was a virtually unknown composer working as an assistant to Mr. Serra. Beyond his availability and willingness, Mr. Glass was a kindred spirit.

''We were both dealing with issues around process and production, minimalism, and self-imposed limitations,'' Mr. Close said. ''I'm painting just black and white, he's making music with just seven notes. And we had a belief in following process wherever it goes.''